In this episode of Called to the Bar, Tamsin Phillipa Paige is joined by Aoife O’Donoghue (Queen’s University Belfast), Ruth Houghton (Newcastle University), and Cher Weixia Chen (George Mason University) to discuss their newly published Research Handbook on Global Governance (2025). Listen to this podcast episode on Soundcloud, here.
The conversation explores what we mean when we talk about “global governance” - and what that concept may obscure as much as it explains. Drawing on the Handbook’s wide-ranging contributions, the editors reflect on the successes and failures of global institutions in responding to climate change, pandemics, war, democracy, human rights, and inequality. They interrogate the ideologies embedded in the language of the “global”, the roles played by states and international organisations, and persistent questions of legitimacy, accountability, and power.
Interdisciplinary in scope and critical in tone, the discussion highlights why law alone cannot explain how global governance works - or fails - and why local, indigenous, feminist, and comparative perspectives are essential to understanding contemporary global ordering. Alongside critique, the episode also asks where hope might be found: not in easy reform narratives, but in rethinking how governance is practised and studied.
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February 23, 2026